Long before online shopping, Americans could flip through a Sears catalog and order something almost unimaginable today: the materials for an entire house. Sears sold its Modern Homes from 1908 through 1940, and estimates put total sales at roughly 70,000 to 75,000 houses.
The Sears kit home looked astonishingly affordable on paper, with some small models advertised for only hundreds of dollars. But those catalog prices can be misleading if we compare them directly with the price of a finished house today. The real story is what buyers received for that money—and what they still had to pay for after the boxcars arrived.
